Ch. 2- In Blogging's Defense

There are two things that stuck out to me in this chapter. One was the inherent purpose of writing, and bringing that to the students, and second was bringing a purpose to reading and writing in other content areas. After all, that is what researchers do right? They write about it and publish their works. In elementary especially, there is an underlying question for writing, yes they do it because they have to, but blogging seems like it would give them purpose and a goal that they are purely responsible for and others will see their work all over the world. They are subjecting themselves to criticism from people they may not even know. Its a purposeful, but gutsy move to create a blog.

Purposefully merging writing, reading, and every other content seems to have been a struggle for elementary. We want science to be hands on, we want gym to be outside, math to be manipulative, but in all our grand desires, at least I would never want to force a child to write about physical education, or read books about math. It doesn't sound interesting to me, so why would it be to an 8 year old? Blogging may have a great idea going here, that where we see academic tracked education taking over, regardless of the needs or desires of the student, this gives them the opportunity to delve more into their subject matter. If a student who is really into automotive reconstruction, writes about it in a blog, gets a few responses and creates a network of people with those same interests and goals, this student may be on his way to the career of his dreams. I realize this is an extremely idealistic way of working the blog, but it could happen.